Finally Coming Up For Air – Our Upcoming Book and Lessons Learned

It’s been a long, LONG time since I’ve updated properly. That’s on me, but I promise, we’ve been very busy. If you’ve been following along as we launched the Kickstarter for Lost Artifacts of Greyghast (our 5e magic item compendium currently clocking in as the single largest D&D supplement ever created), you know we’ve had our elbows deep in the process.

Rewriting our “Better Than Nothing” items to meet the demands of practical games, inventing dozens of new items to be included, illustrating, editing, playtesting, designing covers and layouts and all of it… exhausting. And then, managing a Kickstarter as well.

The party started on all of this in April and only now, in mid-July, am I finally coming up for air. In all that time? I ran no games. I couldn’t even look at gaming stuff without feeling tired. Only in the last week or so have I really felt like a fan again. It’s a creative/work headspace that I hear from a lot of serious content publishers that they go through as well. When the work (necessary as it is) exceeds the love, from time to time.

But, we made it and the manuscript–100% playtested and edited–is being arranged with our Art. It’s downhill from here until printing and shipping (internationally, to all kinds of places).

We’ve had such an influx of email and messages ever since the Kickstarter funded about what our experience was like and what advice we could give. The truth is? I have been overjoyed to share it. I’ve so very embraced the Kickstarter world, I think I’m going to probably do a regular review and survey of new and in progress Kickstarters. It’s a fantastic tool and we were lucky to have made good use of it.

What up next, though, right? What’s the new shindiggity?

Our Backer Survey asked about what products people might be interested in next. We’ll be releasing that in a post later, but the short version is that people out there are really hungry for novel adventures… not basic dungeon crawls, not Faerun arcs, not the usual storming a keep or delving into a cavern, etc. They want to do weird stuff less represented.

We’ve had a lot of people perk up to our Dark-as-fuck Arch-Fey adventure–which is currently being playtested here and there. One playgroup went one way with it, the other another way… one of the groups is barely staying ahead of a dark dungeon of lies and misfortune and the other group is struggling through some bizarre alien stuff, going mad.

The only thing I can say for certain is that Many-Sided Dice will be doing two things later this year (at least).

First, we’re going to put out another book–nowhere near as big as Lost Artifacts of Greyghast. We’re talking a third the size (which would still be 150-175 pages, bigger than most out there) and very likely a third the costs. $20-25 books. We’re eyeballing our Arch-Fey adventure and Traps most heavily, but we’ll make that decision when we’re done collecting surveys and talking with our creative partners.

Second, we’re going to dive deeply into D&D and RPG Kickstarters. One of the struggles we had with ours was how hard it was to get clear norms and advice and guidance on such a specific vein of the crowd-funding world. Not that there are “no” such sources, but we would have loved to have seen a place online with some credibility really showcase and dig into the work of those Creators.

So… why not do it ourselves? Our hope is that becomes a site regular. Interviews. Tight questions on risks, production, what makes their product a market difference, previews of the content or art or writing, candid discussions about distribution hopes and questions from backers or potential backers that might could do with clarifications.

Anyhow, that’s it for us today. Expect more posts like we used to do. And we haven’t stopped with any homebrew stuff… we’re just getting started here.